Archive for April, 2009

We have had many requests for this item, but we couldn’t produce such a geometric shape until we purchased a new laser engraver. Shipped in assorted colors. Any name-drop would be located above the “66.”

One advantage of having your workshop in the country is that land is plentiful. This spring, we’ve decided to put in a small garden for our apartment dwelling employees.

We are going organic. The plot hasn’t been tilled for eight years, and before that it was a horse pasture, so the soil is herbicide and pesticide free. The first task was to till up the grass near an outside faucet. To improve the soil, we had some organic, compost soil hauled in from Soilmaker.com. Yes, the soil really is that black!

We’ll use any unplanted garden space to grow some give-away veggies like heirloom Brandywine tomatoes. Cucumbers and squash are a big favorite around here. Also on the short-list are hot peppers for making hot sauce, and cabbage for authentic fermented sauerkraut. We might even start some perennials like asparagus and rhubarb, too.

Scanning barcodes at checkout time is now commonplace even in small stores. Clay Critters provides a free barcode ticketing service to any retailer who uses a point-of-sale system (POS).

We generally use the standard 12-digit UPC-A barcode styles, although we have permission to print the space saving, 6-digit, zero-suppressed UPC-E style reserved for companies selling small products.

The 12-digit unified product codes (UPC) barcode consist of three portions, the company code (first six digits), the product stocking code, or SKU (next five digits), and finally a checksum digit to verify that the scanner read the barcode correctly. Clay Critters’ company code is 093300 and is registered with the Uniform Code Council (UCC), so there is never a possibility of a misread or mischarged code from us.

All of our barcodes are printed in-house using a Zebra-4M barcode printer. We never have to wait for a label shipment. This high-contrast printer is unique; instead of printing round dots, like your laser printer and FAX does, it prints square dots, which make the barcode bars crisper and more accurately scanned. Learn more about barcodes at Wikipedia.